OK, now you’ve done it. I’ll just have to share a couple of my error-message stories, both from several jobs ago. One customer asked about “about to chunk the butt” which was appearing in his disk-array logs. When asked, the guy who’d written that piece of software said he had no idea why he’d put that in, because he was stoned at the time. He was CTO of my last company, by the way.

The other was my fault. This was cluster software, and in the case of a partition – or, more precisely, discovering that the cluster *had* been partitioned – it was necessary to “kill” members of one group so they could join the other as individuals. The message we used to do this was DGSP – Die, Gravy Sucking Pig. Needless to say, this started appearing in a log file (which wasn’t even supposed to be enabled in the shipped code) when a customer was having trouble, so they asked. I told the support engineer, but he figured he couldn’t tell the customer what it *really* stood for so he made up “Diagnostic Group Shutdown Partition” instead.

One from my old mainframe assembler days: someone we worked with who was later fired left behind a message in the OS code (I think this was VS1) that would randomly appear put on the console: “A.M.F.!!” Which I was told by someone meant “audios motherf___er!!”